How to become an entrepreneur - and why you're never too young to start

Entrepreneurs

01 Nov 2016

At this year's WIRED Next Generation in London, co-founder of Entrepreneur First, Alice Bentinck – a woman who defines each of these terms – discussed exactly what it means to become an entrepreneur and how to become one in four steps.

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Firstly, remember that skills outweigh experience, Bentinck told the predominantly teenage audience. The rise of technology now means you can create a company with the main cost simply being your time and a desire to learn.

Secondly, age doesn't matter. You don't need to go to university; skills give you the credibility you need.

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Here are Bentinck's stages of becoming an entrepreneur:

Take risks: Risks create opportunities and by avoiding risks, you avoid opportunity. "If we don't know what the career of the future looks like it means we can experiment and take those risks. There's never been a better time," Bentinck said.

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Take on the impossible: One of the benefits of being young is that you have a kind of naïve optimism about the world. You don't know what is and isn't possible so can think more broadly. Don't limit yourself. As we get older, we can succeed by taking risks on things that years of experience may have suggested are impossible.

Work on problems you care about: Many people find themselves in jobs they don't enjoy because they don't care about it. Bentinck advises you to think about what you care about. This can include hobbies, problems in your communities, health problems, problems at school, and so on.

"Knowing what you care about and using it as a stimulus to get into entrepreneurship is the key to starting a business," said Bentinck.

Develop a growth mindset: Having a growth mindset is increasingly being taught in schools and it is the idea that you can change your skills and ability. Some people assume they can't do certain things because they're bad at maths, bad at sport, don't like selling. Having a growth mindset means even if you don't have those abilities now, you can develop them in the future and change your future.

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Bentinck’s Entrepreneur First accelerator helps individuals build tech companies from scratch through a six-month incubator. Three hundred founders have already developed their ideas with the accelerator.

Entrepreneur First's alumni includes Magic Pony Technology, which was included as one of WIRED's hottest European startups in 2016, and Cleo, an AI assistant to help you manage your finances.

Bentinck also co-founded Code First: Girls, free coding courses for women who are in university or have recently graduated, which aims to increase the number of women entering the tech sector by providing them with the tools they need. Founded in 2012, in its first year Code First: Girls trained 500 women and has gone on to train many more.